Rainfall Is Nice, But It's Challenging For City Of Tulsa Mowing Crews

While Green Country needs the rain, it will mean challenges on down the road keeping up with mowing.

Under Tulsa's new budget, the streets department took the biggest cut by not filling positions and cutting back on mowing.

So will Tulsa be able to tackle tall grass from all the precipitation?

Getting July rain is nice, especially considering we're way below normal for rainfall, and have been for several years.

But mowing the tall grass will be a tall order with the tight city budget.

"With all this rain, it's going to make it a little more difficult," City of Tulsa’s Dwain Midget said.

The city gets tons of nuisance complaints about people with tall grass and weeds.

But there are only a handful of field officers with code enforcement to follow up on those complaints to make sure property owners are mowing.

"Because of pressures on our general fund, actually have about seven field officers now to cover the entire city,” Midget said.

Tulsa is down three positions from last year. A while back before the recession hit, the city had 15 field inspectors.

With the rain falling and the grassing growing, the bottom line comes down to response time.

"Our response time is going to be a little slower, that's just a fact,” Midget said.

The inspectors check out complaints usually in seven business days.

Property owners get ten days to mow.

Then the property has to be re-inspected, before the city gets a contractor to mow the property.

"Both on the initial investigation and on the recheck because of the number of complaints we get, and the dwindling number of code officers, it's going to take some time,” Midget said.

City leaders say the nuisance complaints will be addressed, they're just asking the public to be patient as they work through the combination of the wet weather and the budget bind.

To make matters even more challenging, budget issues prompted Tulsa to cut the number of mowing cycles for places like right of ways from 10 last fiscal year to only six this year.